Carrot is a biennial plant that grows a rosette of leaves in the spring and summer, while building up the stout taproot, which stores large amounts of sugars for the plant to flower in the second year. The flowering stem grows several decimeters (e.g. 60-200 cm) tall, with an umbel of white flowers that produce a fruit called a mericarp.
Carrot (Daucus carota subsp. sativus), is a root vegetable, usually orange in colour, though purple, red, white, and yellow varieties exist. It has a crisp texture when fresh. The most commonly eaten part of a carrot is a taproot, although the greens are edible as well. It is a domesticated form of the wild carrot Daucus carota, native to Europe and southwestern Asia. The domestic carrot has been selectively bred for its greatly enlarged and more palatable, less woody-textured edible taproot. The world production of carrots and turnips for calendar year 2011 was almost 35.658 million tonnes (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)).
Vegetable breeder's aim is to combine desirable traits in a single variety. Such desirable traits may include any trait deemed beneficial by a grower and/or consumer, including greater yield, resistance to insects or disease, tolerance to environmental stress, and nutritional value.
A uniform population of a breeding line can be obtained by self-pollination and selection for type. Plants thus obtained become homozygous at almost all gene loci, i.e. a homozygous plant. Crossing two such plants of different genotypes produces a uniform population of hybrid plants that are heterozygous for many loci. On the other hand, a cross of two plants each heterozygous at a number of loci produces a population of plants that differ genetically and are not uniform. Due to this non-uniformity, performance of such plants is unpredictable.
Breeders thus prefer development of homozygous inbred plant that can be crossed to produce uniform varieties. Pedigree breeding and recurrent selection are examples of breeding methods that have been used to develop inbred plants from breeding populations. Those breeding methods combine the genetic backgrounds from two or more plants or various other broad-based sources into breeding pools from which new lines and hybrids derived therefrom are developed by selfing and selection of desired phenotypes. The new lines and hybrids are evaluated to determine which of those have commercial potential.
So far, breeding efforts have provided a number of useful carrot lines with beneficial traits, however, there remains a great need in the art for new lines with further improved traits. There is thus a need for new carrot varieties having specific combination of trait or color.